Tag Archives: The Marquesas

‘That the Marquesas are spectacular is well known; yet I am not prepared for the towering mountains of Fatu Hiva rising directly from the deep sea, looming high to the heavens as we near them. Green slopes and rugged crags are capped by summits more than half a mile high that look steep even for goats. This is tropical alpine scenery of savage beauty, a landscape that would seem improbable as a stage set for South Pacific itself.’

Andrew Rayner, ‘Reach for Paradise: A journey among Pacific Islands’

‘This swatch of the Pacific – a wet cosmos so remote and underpopulated that the only thing you’re likely to see afloat is an occasional exhausted seabird or a weathered flip-flop – is the last corner of the world to remain immune from the trade flows of globalization. It is lonely out here.’

‘The twelve islands of the Marquesas, today part of French Polynesia, lie 1,200 kilometres north-east of Tahiti. An archipelago of volcanic monoliths, and further from a continental landmass than any other islands on Earth, they were first settled by Polynesian voyagers from the west – probably Samoa – about 2,000 years ago and became a dispersal centre for further migrations, to Hawaii, Easter Island, the widely scattered islands of southern Polynesia and, eventually, New Zealand. The Marquesan language is more akin to New Zealand Maori than to Tahitian.’

‘Before missionaries converted the people to Christianity, the Marquesans fought among themselves and were noted cannibals, but diseases brought by the white man had a more devastating effect on the population than earlier practices had.’

Mary E. Trimble, ‘Sailing with Impunity: Adventure in the South Pacific’

‘Celine continued to speak of the beauty of her island as she hand-rolled a cigarette. “This place is not like Tahiti with its crown and pollution. Tahiti is finished. Here, it is like it always was.”’